[LEAPSECS] internet drafts about zoneinfo

Rob Seaman seaman at noao.edu
Mon Mar 7 17:19:34 EST 2011


Warner Losh wrote:


> This mapping is both lossy (because you can't undo it unambiguously) and ambiguous (since the standard insists that leap seconds don't exist).


"Lossy" isn't quite the right word. Unfortunately the only antonym offered for "idempotent" is "changed".

The point being that lossy compression may well preserve the essential content of some signal:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.1179

while mangling by POSIX does not.

Perhaps "irreversible"? The mapping is surjective but not injective? (Depends which mapping we're talking about.) At any rate it is not bijective, not both one-to-one and onto.

Rob




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